Jonathan Lethem

Risky Business — Cartoonist Adrian Tomine talks about his new book Scenes From An Impending Marriage, which originally started life as a mini-comic for his wedding guests, with More Intelligent Life:

I probably first started thinking about publishing it when a copy appeared on eBay. I assumed that since it was only given to close friends and family, that would never happen, but I was wrong. And like I said, since I was slowly adding pages to the book, I eventually found myself with 50 or 60 pages worth of material, and I just proposed the idea to my publisher. If he had declined, I would’ve happily filed it away…

AND Adrian and his wife Sarah Brennan talk about the new book with NPR’s All Things Considered.

(For the record, Scenes From An Impending Marriage is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

Sunny-Side — Jonathan Lethem talks to Carolyn Kellogg at The LA Times about decamping from Brooklyn to Southern California. There is more of their conversation at Times’ Jacket Copy blog:

I’ve only probably reviewed seven or eight novels. It’s really problematic. I’m gregarious with writers; I like novelists. I don’t want my sympathies to cause me to write a review that’s in any kind of bad faith, nor do I want to destroy some pleasant, even if it’s slight, collegial feeling. I try to review the dead guy — Bolaño — or the biography of the dead guy, because I like being in the conversation. Sometimes I look at what Updike did at the New Yorker. I don’t know if many people have the temperament, let alone the incredible set of skills he brought to that, the versatility, the endless curiosity, to identify with so many different kinds of novelists who were not doing what he does.

The Price of Zero — David Carr on media companies and unpaid contributors for The New York Times:

For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there is that, and more about the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero… For the media, this is a Tom Sawyer moment. “Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” he says to his friends, and sure enough, they are soon lined up for the privilege of doing his chores. That’s a bit like how social networks get built. (Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”)

And finally…

In the Age of Screens — A serialized essay about contemporary book discovery and reading by Chad W. Post, publisher of Open Letter Books, editor of  the Three Percent blog:

[W]e’ve stripped away all the institutions that supported the ways in which most outsiders found their literature, leaving texts to float untethered in the ether, there to be found… There is no serendipity… And yet, for the long-term benefit of society, we need people to have—and be exposed to— ideas from the out-of-­nowhere.

The complete essay is available as a PDF.

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